What is it with Gansu and body parts?

After reports of 121 skulls being found in a remote ravine on the border of Qinghai and Gansu provinces, western China was already starting to look a little creepy, even if the skulls may have actually been a part of a Tibetan Buddhist ritual, as the unlinkable South China Morning Post reports:

Buddhism researcher Zhao Min said some practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism used craniums to "destroy desire and remind us thatlife is unpredictable".

Mr Zhao said cups made from skull caps were not mandatory tools for Buddhist lamas and were not in widespread use.

Cups and beads made from human skulls can be found on the online shop taobao.com for more than 1,000 yuan.

According to a Beijing man who sells items on taobao.com, the beads are made from the skulls of lamas, who donated them to be made into items to protect people.

He said the skull caps of ordinary people were also sometimes made into cups or beads, but they were usually dangerous because their histories were unknown.

He said he believed that because the Gansu skulls had been abandoned, Buddhists could not have been involved: "This is very evil. And the punishment it brings about must be huge."

Right. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't still give Shanghaiist the willies. And check out that photo -- isn't it rather obvious those are definitely not monkey heads? And if Buddhists aren't involved, where and how in the world did somebody manage to get their hands on all those people's heads? Looks like Shanghaiist isn't the only one who is confused and concerned.

And then Shanghaiist spotted another gruesome story involving Gansu and dismemberment in the ever-unlinkable South China Morning Post earlier today:

The Lanzhou Public Security Bureau said the upper arms and other body tissue discovered at the site were leftovers from the construction of a human teaching specimen by a laboratory connected to the Gansu College of Traditional Chinese Medicine.

Police said the remains were put into a white plastic bag in front of the laboratory door on March 31 and were supposed to be taken to a medical waste facility the next day.

But a cleaner mistook the bag for general waste and put it in a rubbish cart. The bag was dumped at the landfill in Chengguan district, where it was discovered by scrap collectors. Police said a 30cm rusty steel saw blade, two pieces of paper with the college's logo and a card belonging to a college social club were also found in the bag.

"The blade was used to cut the parts from the specimen," said the bureau's propaganda director, Peng Hailin . "And we did not find any cooking ingredients as the media reported."

Under the headline, "Cooked child's limbs found at a Gansu landfill", the Lanzhou Morning Post had reported that two arms were found in the bag along with other meat, bones, ginger and chilli.

Of course, the eternally censored Epoch Times would never miss the opportunity to publish an overwrought and undercooked story about China's evils and made sure to sling out a story about this yesterday: Child Dismembered and Boiled in Gansu Province. Again, Shanghaiist feels only mildly comforted by the results of a subsequent investigation into the discovery of body parts. We're left to wonder why a very large rusty steel saw blade was being used for "human teaching" purposes that apparently involved ... uh ... dismemberment?

Photo from Yahoo! News.